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Yogi Bhajan Lecture: On Love

Man cannot live without love. He must love and also he must be loved. Love is the highest fulfillment on every level.

When you are recognized, it is an expression of love. When a present is given to you, it is an expression of love. When someone communicates to you, it is an expression of love. When someone smiles at you, it is an expression of love. All these are expressions of love.

But can you be satisfied with expressions? No, you want to experience something. Even when you have physical or verbal or mental intercourse, are you loved? No. These are also expressions of love.

Then what is love? When you feel and experience selflessnsess within yourself and you can vibrate for someone else, then you are fulfilled with love. This is the highest state of individual consciousness.

Everything else is beautiful. These feelings are of such fulfilling beauty that we do not have the vocabulary at our command to explain them and our inability to explain only tells us that these feelings exist like ecstasies. If you can explain ecstasy, it is not an ecstasy.

Love is the experience of selflessness within oneself. No one else is involved. Love is a power beyond the being because love is a totality of the being. Love is not a business. "I'll bring you flowers, you give me a kiss." It's not a commodity. It does not need approval or appreciations (otherwise it must depreciate). The state of love is beyond this. Come what may, neither is there "Yes" or "Nay."

Sacrifice is the beginning of every love. One must subject one’s self in order to receive an object. Love means giving. Self-sacrifice means that you accomplish for someone else at the expense of yourself.

Love is the experience within one's self of one's own selflessness. That's why love is God. No one can explain love because love is ecstasy. Love is the essence of an ever-longing devotion. Love does not change. If love changes, it is not love.

Love is the most secure place in an individual. It is a very secure, very deep, very curative healing. It has no pain. Love doesn't know pain. It's not small. It's not limited. It has no argument. It's beyond the beyond.

The highest state of security of an individual is when a person is in the state of love. It is a consciousness which can penetrate through anything for that thing and nothing can penetrate in it.

When you are insecure you do not love, and when you do not love you do not live. When someone caters to your emotions you feel you are in love, but in reality love is the opposite of this. When you sacrifice your emotions for someone, then that is love.

Love is an experience of selflessness within oneself. Love is a sacrifice and sacrifice is real life. When you sacrifice you realize you are alive. Those who are dead when they are alive, how can they ever die? It is difficult to commit suicide when you're alive. It is not a physical suicide – that is a coward’s act, but suicide of the ego on the altar of the Universal Self. You must do it for yourself. Then you do not know death. You live forever.

Without love, there is no God. Without love, there's no spirit. Without love, there's no prosperity. Without love, there's no sincerity. Without love, there's no growth in you. There is no happiness without love.

Love is the key to everything you are in and you are out. Love is a total state of mind of tolerance. Total tolerance is love. Love has no limit. When it has a limit, then it is not love.

Excerpts from Relax and Rejoice: A Marriage Manual. No longer in print.